Fighting Climate Change Requires Holding China Accountable
World leaders gathered in Egypt last month for COP27, where they set out to create another annual climate commitment and incubate new potential solutions for climate action. One such proposal to emerge from this year’s conference was the idea that wealthy countries, like the U.S., should pay reparations to developing countries for climate-related disasters like floods and violent storms.
In the weeks since, a debate over climate reparations has ensued, with world leaders and environmentalists alike chiming in on the validity and feasibility. Noticeably missing from the discourse, however, has been China and its ruling Communist Party.
China is unique in that it still enjoys a “developing nation” classification from the United Nations. With that, they get to skirt responsibility when it comes to major commitments like the aforementioned climate reparations. When you consider that China is the world’s second largest economy and the world’s largest polluter, this is absurd. Not to mention, through their Belt and Road initiative, they have spent over a trillion dollars building dirty infrastructure, like coal-fired power plants, in actual developing nations to gain political influence. That hardly seems like the foreign aid budget of a struggling country.
For too long, world leaders have been too afraid to stand up to China. Meanwhile, they have committed year after year to ambitious climate proposals that, in actuality, will do very little to curtail global emissions without China’s cooperation and involvement.
When it comes to competing on climate, China and the U.S. aren’t even playing the same game. While America acts in good faith to make climate progress, China is out to make a buck while clinging to their dirty habits domestically.
In a similar vein, a recent issue that has only grown in urgency is China’s dominance in clean infrastructure manufacturing and the supply chain issues that have come up as a result. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which President Biden signed into law last year, essentially prevents the United States from importing products without documentation that proves they were not produced with slave labor. The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that more than a gigawatt-worth of solar technology has been stopped at Customs, and working out the kinks in the law’s requirements is causing serious challenges for the solar industry.
China is betting on our preference for clean energy to win out over our preference for human rights.
Some may see the poor working conditions in China as unfortunate, but not enough to justify a slowdown of renewable energy development. This is an unconscionable position. Slave labor should never be a means to achiever cheap solar panels. If we are pro-planet because we are pro-people, then we need to stand up for people being exploited in the name of climate progress. At the end of the day, we should be fighting climate change for human success, rather than putting the two goals at odds.
This brings us to the very core of China’s unwillingness to address their climate sins. They hold a fundamental different view on human rights.
Those of us engaged in climate policy do so because we care about people. That is, after all, the very reason for wanting to conserve our environment in the first place: to create a world in which future generations can thrive. China, on the other hand, has a different vision. They have made it clear that they are not pro-people, so it should not surprise us that they are, as such, also not pro-environment.
The debate around 2050 net-zero targets or climate reparations mean nothing if the world’s largest polluter is neither at the table nor compelled to be. As long as China skirts responsibility, our climate will suffer. If world leaders are serious about beating climate change, they must first beat China’s indifference.
Stephen Perkins is the vice president of grassroots strategy at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). Follow him on Twitter @Stephen_Perkins.
